In telco world, telco operators continue to push for disaggregating, realigning, and re-integrating network functions, elements, and systems, in order to meet various evolving market demands, changing network conditions, and unpredictable traffic patterns in short innovation cycles. Under this push, the telco industry looks with interest at the possibility at adopting and converging newer technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) as well as other technologies (e.g., network function virtualization (NFV) and the like) to achieve a truly programmable network fabric for addressing future communication needs. While such cloudification and softwarization of the network promises to offer a range of new services, an unparalleled level of automation, and unique flexibility, it also presents significant challenges. Cloud services can be instantiated in a matter of seconds, yet the capability to rapidly schedule, test, and allocate physical network resources for operators is often many times slower. Most of the deployment time is spent in manually (or close to manually) tuning the different “knobs” in the control plane (e.g., in the SDN and telco cloud) and running tests to actually guarantee that the network is able to meet specific levels of service (e.g., latency, throughput, or the like). To further complicate things, in the near future operators likely will have to address the need for massive increases in control plane capacity to handle Machine-to-Machine (M2M) streams from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which are expected to grow significantly in the future. For instance, IoT devices generate a substantially higher volume of signaling traffic relative to data traffic, which will significantly increase the load on the control plane. While configuration of network devices can be simplified by using network abstractions and SDN platforms, solutions for performance testing of SDNs are needed.